(In)Complete modding newb's questions

[Sparksol]

I'm starting with almost nothing in modding and about the same in lua knowledge, but I've got some ideas that I'd like to try myself rather than asking someone else to make them. Only problem is, I've got no idea if I'm starting with reasonable goals for practice mods, or if I should find easier first projects.

First up, I'd like to make a client-side mod that changes what rabbits look and sound like into Shipwrecked crabbits. Not changing them on servers, not affecting their drops, just a reskin that only the user is seeing. Is that something that's simple, or would it be easier to actually make crabbits as a DST creature and just replace rabbits?

Which leads into the second idea. A server-side mod to randomly change half the rabbits into crabbits. Still no new drops or brains or anything, just what amounts to a reskin, only server-side. This seems like it'd be about the same difficulty, but since I have no idea what I'm doing, I don't actually know yet.

And the last one, placing crabbits - fish morsels and recipes for those and so on - and putting them mostly around the edges of the land instead of mostly grasslands, and possibly with an option to remove rabbits. This one is probably actually the easiest, since there's tutorials for making new creatures and items.

So are these decent total-beginner-level things, or is it a better idea to go learn plain lua for a few weeks before touching this stuff?

[Leonardo Cox]

I've never done alot of clientside code, so I wouldn't be able to tell you how to make it client only. 

Your second idea might be the 2nd easiest, as you could just edit either the rabbithole with a prefabpostinit and make it have a 50% chance of spawning either crabbit or rabbit. (you'd probably need to make your own crabbit prefab, not sure how to go about editing existing prefab files to have multiple different prefabs in one).

For the last idea, making the fish morsels and recipes would be the easiest part, but iirc messing with worldgen might be tricky.

--------------------

I say maybe start making a crabbit prefab for the mod (don't copy the prefab from Shipwrecked as it uses a lot of invalid code for DST) mostly copying the rabbit. Once you have Crabbit working then trying adding fish morsels, recipes, etc. Then go from there.

---------------------

As long as you know the basics of lua/coding (like what functions, strings, if and then end, etc. are) then you shouldn't have too much difficulty understanding what works after awhile.

 

Edit: But I doubt I'm the best person to answer this, as I don't know a whole lot of DST's innerworkings compared to a lot of other modders here.

Edited November 1, 2016 by DarkKingBoo

[Serpens]

this halloween mod made exactly what you describe in your first sentences. It was a client_only first, but it seems there were some difficulties and he had to change it to all_clients_require.  You could ask the author what went wrong :
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=784729547

[Sparksol]

Thanks for the advice!

11 hours ago, DarkKingBoo said:

As long as you know the basics of lua/coding (like what functions, strings, if and then end, etc. are) then you shouldn't have too much difficulty understanding what works after awhile.

Sadly, while I'm aware of what they are and to be very aware of brackets and commas, but I'm not entirely familiar with what everything does yet. I'm kind of using these as nonlinear lua learning projects as well as simple mods. On the bright side, there's plenty of info available so I'll figure it out eventually.

11 hours ago, Serpens said:

this halloween mod made exactly what you describe in your first sentences. It was a client_only first, but it seems there were some difficulties and he had to change it to all_clients_require.  You could ask the author what went wrong :
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=784729547

That sounds like a good idea, thanks!